Her Mother's Daughter (63 page)

“That's her name? Panee? What kind of name is that?”

“Pan-i.” I spelled it. “It's Polish for Madam, Mrs.”

“She a Polack?”

“She's Polish. Like me.”

“You a Polack? With a name like Carpenter?”

“I'm
Polish.
Carpenter's my married name.”

“Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting. You seem so young.”

I had to acknowledge that he was trying to compliment me, so I laughed, putting my napkin beside my coffee cup in a final sort of way. “Well, those two kids didn't come from the Holy Ghost.”

He howled at that. “You're somethin', Stacey, you really are! You're a hoosher!”

My back tingled. (What did
hoosher
mean?)

I stood up.

“Okay, okay, just let me get the bill, okay?”

“I'll be in the toilet.”

“Ha? Oh, the ladies' room! Okay. I'll get the bill.”

I got him out of there a little before ten, but he drove not to my house, but his. He stopped in front of it. “That's where I live. All alone.” It was a huge house, it looked to have ten rooms. “How about a little tour and a nightcap? It's quite a place, my wife fixed it up really swell. Americana.”

“Some other time, thanks. I have to get back.”

He slid toward me and put his arm around me.

“No, Jimmy.” I unwound myself from him. “I'm serious. I want to go home.”

I couldn't believe what happened next. He thrust himself on me, wound me up in his arms, pressed his chest against mine, began to kiss me, seeking my mouth no matter how I turned my head. It was, quite literally, a wrestling match. I'd never encountered anything like that even from the boys in high school. I pushed against him with my hands, squirmed my body out from under, but there was no place for me to go. When I could get my face free, I shouted “STOP!”

Shocked, he did.

“Take me home! Now! If you don't, I'll walk! And I'll tell everyone in the newsroom that I did, too!”

He pulled away from me, looking at me with shocked contempt, a sense of betrayal.

“Okay, okay.” He started the car. It was only three-quarters of a mile to my house and we were there in a few minutes. When he stopped the car—leaving the motor running—in front of my house, he glanced at me resentfully. “How was I supposed to know?” he asked in a hurt angry voice. “You took the dinner, didn't you?”

I glared and opened the door, got out, and slammed it; he almost knocked me down pulling away from the curb suddenly, with a shriek of tires. Adolescent, I thought, and wearily climbed the stairs to my apartment. The kids were in bed and Pani was nodding over some detective drama flickering in black and white on the tube. I paid her and saw her downstairs, chagrined at having had to spend money for the evening I'd just experienced. Then I turned off most of the lights and settled myself in my soft cozy old armchair with a whiskey, and thought about my future.

I was worried about how Jimmy was going to describe his evening with me to the guys in the newsroom, and what my situation there would be. If he spit hate at me, they might start to look at me suspiciously, coldly. And given that their fellowship and camaraderie was all that made my boring job bearable, I would be unhappy if they turned against me. I tried to see it from his point of view—what would serve his interests? But I couldn't. I kept imagining him pretending we'd had a great time, because he wouldn't want to admit his own failure. But what would he lead them to believe about sex? I cursed myself for having accepted his invitation in the first place. “I should have known better,” I kept muttering.

Suddenly I felt a movement in the air and looked up to see Arden standing a few feet away from me in her pale nightgown.

“Hi!”

She smiled and came toward me. I put my arm around her. “Still awake?”

“I couldn't sleep,” she announced seriously, although I could see sleep creases in her cheek.

I lifted her to my lap, and wonder of wonders, she allowed it. She nestled against me. “Why not?”

“I didn't like that man. I was afraid of him.”

“You were afraid I'd keep going out with him and he'd start bossing you around,” I suggested.

She looked at me, raising her warm pink face. “How did you know?”

“Oh, I just guessed.”

“Well, will you?”

“No. I won't go out with him again.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

She settled her head down again. “Mommy?”

“Un-hum.” I was rocking her now.

“Will you go out with other people?”

Oh-oh. I considered. Right at that moment, she wanted me to say no, and would be comforted if I did. But she might remember it, and think I'd lied to her. She was ten, after all. “Probably. Someday.”

Her body stiffened. “Oh.”

“But I won't let anybody boss you around. Ever. Only me,” I laughed.

“Okay.” She laughed. “We could go out on a double date.”

“WHAT?”

She giggled wildly. “Yes,. Bobby Lench asked me to go to the movies with him on Saturday. Can I go?”

I was amazed. I'd thought she was at the boy-hating stage. “Do you want to go? What movie? At night? No, certainly not.”

She was still laughing. “No, not at night, silly, in the afternoon. And then have a soda or something. Maybe go to McDonald's. I want to go. Joyce is going with Huey Ashe. And Joan is going with G. G. McKerrow. I want to go too.”

I breathed again. A social occasion. “Yes, honey, you can go.”

“We're going to go dutch, Mom. So I need money. Do you know what that is, going dutch?”

I nodded. “How much money?”

“A dollar.”

She had no idea how precious a dollar was to me. I'd been careful that she have no idea. “Sure.”

She jumped down. “I'll sleep now,” she said happily, and went off, still a child in body, but oh my god, what next?

My life continued as it was through Arden's eleventh birthday November, and almost to Christmas of 1959. I didn't go out again with anyone, but my status at the office remained the same. I gathered Jimmy Hanna had told everyone we had a nice time, that I was a good kid and devoted to my children, so he felt as if he were out with his kid sister. I looked like somebody's kid sister, so they accepted his story, at least to his face—and mine. That was a help. But Arden, now in sixth grade, had started to menstruate, and suddenly, she needed things—sweaters, money for Cokes, movies, fashion magazines, records. I didn't have it. I explained that I could give her only $1.50 a week allowance, and that at her age, that should be enough. Saturday movies, I had found out, were 50 cents, a Coke was 10 cents. That left 90 cents a week; she would have to save up to buy the things she wanted.

“Mommy!” (Three syllables.) “The other kids all get three dollars a week. It's not fair! A magazine is seventy-five cents alone, and records are eighty-five cents! If I have a Coke in the afternoon after school, all I have left is forty cents. I can't live on that!”

I turned softly so she wouldn't see me laugh: I can't live on that, indeed! “I'm sorry, Arden.” I turned back. “But you're getting to be grown up enough to understand that I don't have much money. I can't afford more.”

She glared at me uncomprehending. “Daddy has lots of money. Get it from him!”

“I'm not calling him up and asking for money, Arden.”

“Then
I
will!” She turned on her heel and stalked—with dignity; she no longer stamped, tore, or flew—into her room.

Billy stood there watching. “Arden's a spoiled brat,” he commented.

“It's just her age, Billy. She wants what the other kids have.”

“But hardly anybody here gets three dollars a week allowance. Lots of kids in this town have hardly any money at all.”

Yes, I knew that. But not many of them had a father who lived in a near-mansion in Garden City either. I hugged Billy. “Well, honey, you try to remember that next year or the year after.”

“I'll never be like her,” he muttered fiercely.

Arden got her three dollars a week from her father; he gave it to her on Wednesday nights, when he took the kids to dinner. This was fine with me, except some weeks he was busy and didn't take them out and completely forgot about the allowance. Then I had to listen to shrieks and tears, accusations of no one loving her, and end up shelling out the three dollars myself. This happened often enough to be annoying, and I told her to ask him to give her double allowance whenever he thought he'd be busy the following week. She told him that I had said this, in a way that sounded as if I had ordered him to do this. He reared up, refused to give her any allowance at all, and called me up and screamed at me. It took me a long time to calm him down, to explain. I told him that what he was hearing was
Arden
's resentment about not sharing in his luxurious style of living, not mine, and that he ought to think about it. He reinstated her allowance and began to buy her presents—usually clothes. He'd even take the trouble to find out what she wanted, and she soon enough caught on and began to hint. He bought Billy things too, but Billy would come home from seeing him, stuff his new shirt or whatever in a drawer, and walk around stiff-mouthed for a day. Arden was different. Something new came into her face. It worried me.

In my year at the
Herald,
I submitted photographs to the picture editor from time to time. I could see it upset him to have to reject any, so I didn't show him anything unless I thought it was exactly the sort of thing the paper wanted. They had bought a half-dozen of them in the year I'd worked there, at fifty dollars a shot. I kept that money apart, for myself. It paid for my film, for developing fluid, printing paper. I'd moved out into landscapes, having bought a wide-angle telephoto lens, and would occasionally take the sort I knew the picture editor liked—two lovers wandering along Silver Lake in Baldwin, in spring, a pretty girl sunning herself on the grass in Hempstead State Park. Cheap shots, but I wasn't then thinking about integrity. I needed the money to continue my…what was it? Certainly I couldn't call it my profession. Hobby, I guess. Hateful word.

I took many pictures for myself, though. I was experimenting still, trying different points of view. Sunrise Highway was being widened, and was torn up. There were huge machines parked along the sides of the lanes, but men still worked with pickaxes and shovels. I took a series of shots of those men, looking up toward them, emphasizing their arms and bared chests. I kept the light down, and used slow film to get depth, sharp contrasts that would show up every muscle and sinew in their bodies; and I shot them huge against a background of sky. What I was thinking about was, I guess, my own life, so full of arduous tasks despite the mechanization of the world. I knew better, however, than to show
women's
labor. No one was interested in that. No one believed women labored.

The
Herald
liked these shots, and used one of them, the one with the best composition: one man was lifting his pickaxe as the other rose from bending to shovel away debris, and the sky was soft with gold-edged clouds behind them. You could see the brilliance of the edging even though the print was black and white. The dichotomy set up was false: smiling nature, the simple life, versus the huge task of creating civilization, man's work. But it appealed to the
Herald
's editors. It appealed to others too, because about a week later I got a phone call from a secretary saying Russ Farrell of
World
magazine was calling.

They'd gotten my number from the
Herald,
Farrell said. They liked my work. Did I have a portfolio?

“Yes,” I said between heartbeats.

They'd like to see it.

Reader, they hired me. I couldn't believe it either. Yes, it was a leap into space. It was arriving at a longed-for destination when one hadn't even known one was on the road. It was being transported into dreams one hadn't even dared to think about dreaming. My future had seemed to me for a long time now a grey space, empty, just more of the same. I hadn't even dared to imagine some Prince Charming arriving to carry me away from the tedium and sense of waste that filled my days. I had never let myself think about photography as a career because I didn't see how I could accomplish that, and like the Indian women I met years later, I believed it was better not to think about what is impossible.

I had assigned no category to myself—not professional or amateur, not commercially, or artistically, inclined. Except I did have a drawer in my photograph file labeled just A; and it was in that drawer that I had filed prints of what I considered
Art
—pictures that made my heart catch a little, that came out to meet the eye, that felt like some kind of truth. And it was the contents of that drawer that I sifted through, culling forty pictures to blow up or crop, to mount, and finally to lay carefully into my newly purchased portfolio the night before I drove myself, frightened that I'd have an accident and never really arrive, to the Long Island Railroad Station, where I purchased a ticket for Pennsylvania Station in New York.

I had had enough wits about me to set the interview a week away. This gave me time to go through all my drawers, considering. I rejected all the pictures of angry or dismayed mothers; and most of those that were interesting, odd close-ups of unusual objects like a stack of sewer pipes or a train wheel, or the inside of an iris. All baby pictures were taboo. I ended with a set showing men working, machines, and a few splendid landscapes. After all, I knew what
World
liked. I saw it every week in the
Herald
waiting room. It was the best picture magazine—and the best paying—in the world. At the time, I regret to say, I did not think at all about concealed censorship; about how, if you want to get ahead in the world, you take your cue from what is established, and shoot the things the establishment enjoys seeing, and avoid those it does not. I didn't think about the ways we are taught, outside the church and the schoolroom, what to value, or about my being manipulated by the power world. I just wasn't thinking: I wasn't a political person. All of that sort of thinking came to me much later, and from other people. I didn't even think about how I automatically knew what photographs to include, or the meaning behind the choice of what to exclude. That seems remarkable to me now, since I had in my youth been a questioner. I had forgotten my youthful self.